Could I skip sixth form and attend a university instead?

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no, you have to be a minimum age to apply. (majority of unis)

There is a girn in my year 13 form class who is a year younger that everybody else (Ske skilled a year in primary shool)
and she is forced to take a gap year because of this.

There is a guy in our flat who celebrated his 17th birthday a week before term started, so this is not true :no:

Reply 41

NS17

I do a CS degree, it's hard. You need 6th Form as a stepping stone to appreciate the jump.

I was like you when I took my GCSE's. I was running my own computer graphics firm at 15 with clients all over England. I also built POS web portals and operated a technical support network.
You may think you know all tricks of the trade but I was fluent in PHP, C, C++, Java and VisualBasic before I even started Maths ALevel. Without it I don't know how I'd be coping.

I hope this post makes sense and is helpful, I'm extremely hungover.

Reply 42

Good bloke

Original post by Horrid_GUI

I am not the greatest at maths, so I will not be continuing maths.

You can program fine without an extensive knowledge of maths as long as you can think logically. It would also depend on what field of development you would be situated in of course, as long as you can apply the formula it shouldn't matter.

You seem to be missing the point. You have stated a desire to study computer science, for which maths is a standard prerequisite and which contains quite a lot of rather hard maths (often beyond A level) and similar subjects (in numerical methods, linguistics and statistics, for instance).

It seems to me that you might be better suited to studying IT, which is rather less theoretically based and will concentrate more on programming, which is only a small component of a computer science degree.

Reply 43

teshnit

You can program fine without an extensive knowledge of maths.

Before A levels, I always wanted to do something computer related at Uni, took Computing at A level, but the pansy IT/ICT, but the standard coding visual basic, binary, assembly code, learning the mundane theory about anything and everything of the insides, soft and hardware etc etc, dropped computing, hated it :P

Before you say I probably wasn't good at computing, i can/could program php/html/msl. Made several websites and managed them for small businesses.

The teachers were telling me, university courses such as computer science, are not so much about programming any more, its more modern practices, since majority of programming is outsource abroad nowadays anyway.

Kid, take maths, even if its not further maths as well, and good choice not to go uni early.

(edited 13 years ago)

Reply 44

Good bloke

Original post by teshnit

You can program fine without an extensive knowledge of maths.

...

university courses such as computer science, are not so much about programming any more

You can certainly program without much knowledge of maths, but this thread was started by someone who stated a desire to study computer science which bears roughly the same relationship to programming as physics does to lightbulbs.

Never mind anymore, university courses in computer science have never been about programming: they just include it.

Reply 45

teshnit

Original post by Good bloke

Sorry yes, my phrasing of it came out wrong, the programming aspect within the course has become smaller, is what i meant to say, and the first line is just a direct quote from the thread starter when he talked about his skills in programming.

However the fundamental point that, being good at programming does not mean you will succeed in a computer science degree, still lies.